


it's the start of us waking up, come on (are you ready? I'll be ready)

by What_Is_A_Mild_Opinion



Series: Golden Cracks and Miracles (This Bittersweet Being is Enough, With You) [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Avatar: The Last Airbender - Freeform, Because I can, Chaotic Family Dynamic, Cuddles and pig piles, Diverse Cultures!, Evryone should always listen to Iroh, Ft. Katara and Zuko: exhausted co-parents, I did random worldbuilding, I'm a sucker for linguistic worldbuilding, Mostly Fluff, No beta we die like Sleep-Deprived College Kids, Sokka and Katara are Disaster Siblings, The Fire Nation thinks it's Hot Stuff, The Gaang are all smol children, The Gaang is a Hot Mess, The Gaang is amazing, The Gaang just needs a hug, Toph and Sokka are basically two year olds, War sucks, Zuko centric - Freeform, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck, Zuko learns about other cultures, slight angst, we love them though, zuko is a good firelord
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:02:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26869363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/What_Is_A_Mild_Opinion/pseuds/What_Is_A_Mild_Opinion
Summary: Growing up, Zuko was taught that the other nations were inferior, that their cultures were barbaric and deserving of correction. But when he watches Katara and Sokka brush their foreheads together every morning when they wake up, their eyes full of love and admiration, sees Suki and Toph doing their dances in the afternoon with a grace he could not dream of, listens to Aang singing in a language like rivers and the wind through trees, he cannot help but think that the other cultures hold a strange, beautiful wonder. How can anyone think they are inferior?---Zuko learns the unfamiliar wonder of the other nation's cultures, corrects some of his internal bias, and earns a bruised, bleeding, beautiful family in the process.
Relationships: Zuko & Aang, Zuko & Sokka & Katara, Zuko & The Gaang, Zuko & Toph & Suki
Series: Golden Cracks and Miracles (This Bittersweet Being is Enough, With You) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1944868
Comments: 40
Kudos: 216





	1. I've Been Blind So Long; Teach Me How To See Again. (Bring Me Home While You're At It)

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's back with her excessive and frankly alarming amount of worldbuilding? This walking disaster! As before, all hail the Language Key. In fanfic, Author is God. Author is God, and the language key is her scriptures. Worship the Language Key. Reference the Language Key. It will save you. This one is mostly fluff to cleanse my soul after that last piece, 'cause HOOO BUDDY that one hurt. Mentions of genocide, grief, and toxic families. They aren't bad, but they are there, so if that bothers you, tread lightly. This is just the Gaang having fun, being stupid, and cleansing Zuko's soul via culture osmosis. Have fun!

When Zuko was young, his first teacher was a prestigious tutor named Shao-Xi, known across the Fire Nation by society’s elite as the best tutor in the world. And Zuko kind of loved her. She always had her hair pulled back in a sleek, glossy, topknot, and when Ozai or others addressed her, she was firm and respectful and the perfect amount of sternly intelligent to get hired by anyone looking to push things into their stubborn children’s skulls. But when the door swung shut behind the servant with his morning check and it was just her and Zuko left in the classroom, her amber eyes would narrow and a mischievous grin would spread across her face, and she would say, “Alright,  _ mhakenyik _ , are you ready for some learning?” 

When Shao-Xi taught him, he learned mostly about the Fire Nation, about their history and their culture. But she taught him about his family, too. Later, he would realize it was a glorified version of the history, that glossed over the far too many unspeakable atrocities committed by his people. 

Once, at dinner, Azula had begun a long conversation with Ozai, loudly declaring that Sozin was a tactical genius and that his premiditative strike against the Air Nation army was such a wise decision. Zuko had tried to ask her why Sozin attacked first, and Ozai had slammed his palm flat against the table so hard it rattled the dishes and his mother spilled her whole drink in her lap. Ozai had roared about how dare he disrespect his brilliant forefather, when he was nothing but an ignorant child. Azula had smirked at him through the whole lecture.  _ Oh, Zuzu,  _ she crooned to him later,  _ when will you learn to keep your mouth shut?  _ But back then, there had still been a hint of actual care in her words, in the concerned flash of her eyes, in the way she sometimes cut him off before he could speak, drowning his words under her own to stop him from saying something wrong. That would flee with the years, leaving him in the deep end with no raft to cling to. It would be almost seven years before he realized Azula had always been with him in the deep end, and no one had ever really taught either of them how to stay afloat. (They both sank, at one point or another. A group of bleeding children with bruised smiles brighter than the sun pull Zuko out. They pull the water from his lungs and teach him to swim. Azula refuses to be taught. She drowns in herself.)

But the next day in class, Zuko asked Shao-Xi about the Air Nation army. “Why did Sozin strike first? What was the Air Nation doing that meant they needed to totally get rid of them?” His unspoken question of  _ Did they really deserve that?  _ hung between them like a poisoned dagger. 

Shao-Xi paused, something burning frigid and boiling behind her eyes. She hesitated for a second too long, and then once again, and again, like she was running through answers in her head, editing and revising as soon as responses came to mind. Finally, with a heavy sigh, she glanced around, her eyes flashing with something he would later realize was terror. She squatted down next to him, sitting on her tiptoes and looking him in the eyes, and Zuko straightened, because she  _ never  _ did that, so this must be very serious.

“Prince Zuko,” she said quietly, her eyes soft and strangely fragile. “The thing that is both a blessing and a curse about history is that it is decided by the winners. If you win, your story is told. That does not mean your story is wrong, but it does mean that someone else’s story has gone unremembered, and it makes everything more complicated. We can only guess at how things really were; we do not actually know.” 

She smiled, tipping her head at him like a bird, resignation and hope and exhaustion swirling in a tangled mess behind her eyes. “People will always tell you how things really happened, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret.”

He leaned in eagerly, and her smile was mischievous as she cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered, “None of us really know!”

“What?” he exclaimed, golden eyes wide with shock. “But  _ enhaou kai  _ Shao-Xi , you are so smart! You know everything!”

She laughed, loud and mirthful. “Well, I am certainly flattered you think so, but no, I don’t know everything. History is mostly just guesswork. Very educated guesswork, founded on evidence. But still guesswork.

“None of us can say with complete certainty what really happened. But the more we understand about  _ both  _ sides in history, the closer we get to understanding the full scope of a situation.”

Her voice was solemn when she next spoke. “If you learn nothing else from me, Prince Zuko, I want you to know that nothing is ever as clear-cut as it seems. No one is ever truly a good or bad person all the way. Good and bad actions are not separated by a clear line, but a huge area of overlap. Whatever you learn from one person, no matter how educated they are, can never be the whole truth. So we must always strive to hear all the voices in a room. Only then can we truly see with any real clarity. So I hope that when you grow up, you will always remember to listen to the stories that breath in the silences. Then you will hear.”

She stood up abruptly, brushing out the wrinkles in her robes, and said, “Now. Did you do the reading over the progression of the main revenue stream from the outer islands in the late part of Fire Lord Kenez’s rule? I sure hope so, because we have a project about it we are going to be working on today!” a massive grin on her face.

Zuko forgot about his question for the rest of class, but that night he laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about how she never really answered his original question, even if her advice seemed important for some reason. 

Barely one year later, when Zuko was eight, Shao-Xi was declared a traitor. The authorities had discovered that she was part of an elite group of betrayers that tipped off Earth Kingdom towns before raids happened. Zuko was stunned. Azula sniffed and turned up her nose when she heard, declaring that she had always thought Shao-Xi’s teaching methods were unorthodox and stunk of disloyalty. Ozai snarled about  _ If I ever find that treasonous wretch,  _ loudly daydreaming about all the horrible things he would subject her to. Zuko couldn’t believe it at the time. She had been so wonderful, and such a good teacher, and he knew she loved the Fire Nation. How could she betray them? (Later, he will leave a scroll for Mai, and confront his father under a dead sun, and leave the palace in the middle of an invasion. He will understand that her love is why she betrayed them. He will think of Shao-Xi the traitor, who was the most brilliant woman he ever met, and the way she always told him that there is a weight to each of your actions; that small ones will affect you, and that big ones will change you, all the way down to your core. He will hope she would be proud of him.)

When Zuko is eight, the responsibility of his tutelage changes to the hands of a man named Fao-Veng, who he hates with every fiber of his being. Fao-Veng is harsh and he moves too quickly through the lessons and when Zuko complains about not understanding Fao-Veng snaps his wrist with a thin piece of leather. Zuko learns to fall behind in silence, and nod even when he has no clue what is going on. But the biggest difference is the content of his teaching. Shao-Xi spoke about the four nations in a way that made Zuko think perhaps they were not so different after all. When she spoke of the Fire Nation, she described their people as striving for honor and happiness, to make their lives and country better. When Fao-Veng speaks about the Fire Nation, he describes it with words like  _ admirable,  _ and  _ courageous,  _ and he speaks at length about how the war will end soon, and the  _ glorious Homeland, as he is blessed by Agni’s light  _ will bring  _ a new era of civility and wonder to the inferior nations living in squalorous anarchy.  _

_That isn’t what Shao-Xi said,_ Zuko thinks, slightly alarmed by his new teacher’s extreme views. _Shao-Xi is a traitor,_ a voice in his head snarled, sounding suspiciously like Azula. _You cannot trust what she says._ (Later, he will lay facing the sun in Earth Kingdom clothes whispering, _Azula always lies._ ) The voice was right. Shao-Xi was a traitor whose thoughts had been corrupted, and her teachings could not be trusted. A voice that sounded like Ursa whispered, _Then why are you still hesitating?_

Zuko threw himself into Fao-Veng’s lessons, his teachings, and soon he was spewing the same lies. He believed them, too, and of the two crimes, this one dwarfed the other, for it was reflected in his behavior even after his banishment. But that was before he had joined a group of war-torn children that bled lives he did not know. That was before he made the decision that was rapidly shoving him further and further into his own personal circle of hell.

\-------

Zuko let out a harsh blow of air through his nostrils, squeezing the bridge of his nose and keeping his eyes shut tight enough that he could almost pretend they would never open again and he wouldn’t have to deal with this. Almost. 

“Sokka,” he said, his voice bordering on a growl. “What in Agni’s name did you do to my tent?”

Sokka looked like an antelopesquirrell caught in torchlight, and the soundtrack of Aang and Toph’s hysterical laughter from where they were leaning on each other a few feet away was only making him more irritated. How dare they laugh at this atrocity of a tent? How dare they find such amusement in his misfortune?

“I was trying to help!” Sokka wailed. “How was I supposed to know?!”

“I have never cleaned a piece of clothing in my life, and even I know you don’t use berries on it to make it smell good!”

“Katara has this weird solution though, for getting out bad smells, and that’s what I thought it was!”

By now even Suki was trying to stifle a laugh. “Sokka,” she said, her face both amused and perplexed. “His tent didn’t smell bad.”

“Exactly! If the thing got rid of bad smells, if there is no smell then it will make it smell good! I swear I had a plan!”

“Did the plan involve ruining my only tent?! Because that’s what it did!”

“It’s still usable,” Sokka said weakly, gesturing at the fabric. “It’s just a little… creative?”

“IT’S HOT PINK!” Zuko bellowed. Aang and Toph, who had just managed to gain a shred of self-control, lost it at his words and dissolved into peals of booming laughter once more. Literally. Aang was laughing much louder than any human had the right to be. Zuko assumed it was a side effect of having airbender lungs, but it was still a little unnerving.

“I didn’t know!” Sokka wailed again. “Katara always complains about how no one ever helps her wash anything, so I was trying to surprise her, and I was also like,  _ Hey, this will probably make Zuko happy, so let’s do that, too,  _ because Katara used it the other day and you said you liked the way it smelled and I swear by Tui and La I  _ didn’t mean to make it pink! _ ”

Zuko opened his mouth to keep scolding him, but froze just as he was sucking in a breath, his mouth hanging halfway open, something twisting prickly and strangely warm in his gut, Sokka’s words bouncing through his skull.  _ This will make Zuko happy, so let’s do that, too.  _ He recovered, snapping his jaw shut and schooling his face into a mask to try to hide that he was currently still reeling from Sokka’s words. 

And perhaps the most damning part of it was that Sokka had said the words in the same way he would say,  _ the sky is blue,  _ or  _ Katara, your cooking is awesome,  _ or  _ science CAN explain rain, dammit!  _ This was a sentence that belonged in the part of Sokka’s brain that was for cold, hard facts. The sky is blue. Katara’s cooking is awesome. Science can explain why it rains. I care about Zuko enough to do something just because I think it might make him happy. 

These were facts about this new family he had found. That they did things, all day, every day, for reasons as simple as  _ this will make them happy, and that makes it worth it to me.  _ It was a kind of love Zuko was still clumsy with. It was a kind of love he desperately wanted to not be clumsy with, so he could show these strange, broken, beautiful people that he cared for them just as much as they did for him. For some reason, the sight of his ugly pink tent wasn’t nearly so bad anymore. 

He sighed, rubbing his temples and trying to fight the wave of awkwardness that always came after one of these tiny shocks. “I’ll ask Katara when she gets back if there’s a way to make it less of a liability.”

Sokka deflated, and Zuko let out an internal yowl of frustration. Nothing he said ever came out right. He wasn’t wrong though; they were war criminals, and a hot pink tent would draw more than a few eyes in a marketplace. But he hadn’t meant it to come out so harshly. Suddenly desperate to wipe the crestfallen look from the other boy’s face, he said, “Sokka.”

Sokka looked up, his face screwed up in a way that made Zuko think that he expected to be scolded again. “Thanks,” he said awkwardly, “for um, for trying to do that for me. It was really, um…” he fumbled over his words, cursing himself the whole time. But Sokka’s face lit up with the brilliance of a blaze of light over gold, making his twisted stumblings worth it.

“No problem,” Sokka chirped, his eyes wide and smiling. “But, um, sorry that your tent is maroon now.”

“Sokka,” Suki laughed incredulously, “that is not maroon. That is roselemon pink.”

Sokka blushed, and all three of them looked down at the fabric in his hands. Now that Suki had said it, he could see the resemblance to the sour, flower flavored fruit (although if he was being honest, the comparison felt a bit mean to roselemons, which were a perfectly lovely type of fruit). 

Aang and Toph finally stopped laughing, wiping away tears of mirth. “Well,” Aang said with far too much amusement, “I think it looks beautiful.”

“Yeah Sokka,” Toph cut in, her words a sort of breathy gasp from laughing so hard. “If Sparky’s reaction was anything to judge by, it’s your greatest masterpiece yet!”

“Hey!” Sokka whined in protest.

This time, when the two walking disasters began to crack up yet again, Sokka and Suki joined in shamelessly. Zuko shook his head, exasperation and amusement swamping the last dregs of his irritation. He could not even try to keep the grin off his face.  
\---

Katara stared at the tent for a good thirty seconds before she even looked up, her face expressionless. Sokka and Zuko were standing in tense silence, shooting nervous glances at each other from the corners of their eyes. Zuko had the strange feeling that this might be what it felt like to be in line for execution. It was yet to be decided whether the two of them actually would be executed for their crimes in the form of a hideously pink tent. Katara looked from the tent, lying happily inanimate on the ground (lucky jerk), to her brother, back to the tent, and then once again to her brother, her eyes wide and eyebrows furrowed, her mouth agape with something like disgusted shock. “ _ How.”  _ she said. “HOW, by Tui and La, did you manage to turn the  _ dark grey tent HOT PINK?!”  _

Sokka gulped. “It is a long story, one we not not get into-”

“Sokka, if you do not explain what happened in the next thirty seconds, Spirits help me, I will freeze you to the top of a tree and leave you there.”

Wisely, Sokka decided to explain, very carefully mentioning the fact that he had been doing it to try and help her and make Zuko happy (which still set fluttering birds loose in his chest, because when was the last time someone besides Mai or Uncle tried to do something just to make him happy?). 

Katara continued glaring at him for a few seconds before borderline yelling, “Well that was very sweet and very stupid of you. I meant I wanted you to help me after I actually showed you what to do, but  _ nooooo,  _ you thought you had a handle on it, so why bother asking one of the two people in camp who actually have experience doing it?”

She snapped the tent up from the ground, folding it with harsh movements, and then swinging it over her shoulder. “Stupid boys,” she muttered. “Stupid boys and their stupid pride.” Her voice turned high and mocking. “ _ I’m not gonna ask for help, ‘cause I don’t need it.”  _ Her accent was getting thicker, the way she said certain vowels growing sharper and shorter. She stormed up to Sokka and yanked him into a tight hug, smacking him on the shoulder. She pulled away and said angrily, “I love you, you  _ teiekiou _ , even if you make more work for me all the time. Never use berries when you wash anything else ever again, or I will follow up on my earlier threat.” Then she stormed off towards the river, growling under her breath about “How can he be so smart, and so freaking dumb at the same time…” 

Zuko stared after her, slightly shell shocked. Katara’s mood swings could be almost as vicious as Azula’s, but even when she was furious with her brother, she still loved him. She still  _ said  _ she loved him, still did things for him, still showed him that she cared. Showed him that her love was more than obligation. (Zuko was not jealous of Sokka, for having a sister who would die for him, would follow him into oblivion just to hold his hand as he went. He’s not jealous. He’s  _ not. _ )

“So, does that mean she can fix my tent?”

Sokka shook his head. “Who even knows. She’s certainly going to try.”

“Sokka,” he said, wrinkling his nose and tipping his head so he could look at Sokka through his good eye. “Do I want to know what  _ teh… tei.. teiekiou _ is?”

Sokka huffed and muttered grumpily to himself, “I’ve got a brain, I thought I was being smart. She’s just overreacting.” Then he turned to Zuko with a sigh. “Um, well,  _ teiekiou  _ is kind of a Southern insult, it’s like… She’s saying I have an empty head, or that I choose not to use how smart I am, so I made a stupid mistake that could have been avoided, which… may be fair, but. It’s kind of our verbal equivalent of smacking someone on the head and calling them an idiot. So, naturally, Katara loves it.”

Zuko wanted to smack himself on the forehead. He had thought Katara was horribly mispronouncing a word from the language of the Fire Nation, which they were currently speaking in. How on earth had it still not sunk into his brain that every other person in this little group had come from an upbringing vastly different from his own? How on earth was he still forgetting that each of them had their own culture, so varied and unique? And, Agni why, could he still not manage to fully banish the twinges of superiority that he felt when he thought about the other cultures?

He knew he was getting better. But not fast enough. He wanted to know, he wanted to see where they came from. During his banishment, he had taken a firsthand dip into the vast world of the other nations’ cultures. When he first started out, he had sneered at them, dismissed them as inferior. But over time, he had begun to recognize that smaller parts of it were… not really all that bad, once you understood them. 

He ate Earth Kingdom meals, he went shopping in the market districts of the larger trade cities. They were always loud, and crowded, full of flies and scavengers and screaming, running children, but everyone there had given him a wide berth, the red of his clothes driving them away. It was different now. Katara had somehow managed to find Earth Kingdom clothes in his size, and then enlisted him to come to the markets with her because,  _ If I have to spend one more trip dragging Sokka away from every other meat shop, I will actually scream.  _ He went to the market. He let Katara drag him around, comparing prices and mentally running over list after list after list that he had no clue how she remembered so flawlessly. People shoved him. They pushed, and they cursed, and they laughed, and more than once tiny children had come up to him begging him to help them get their ball down from somewhere. Vendors yelled at him, and a few girls winked, and no one had any respect for personal space. He kind of loved it. Not that he would admit that, but he was pretty sure Katara knew, because after they made their amends, she invited him every time she went, and he sometimes caught her smiling at him when she thought he couldn’t see her, hiding her giggles with coughs when he drank it all in with wide, golden eyes.

But despite his best efforts, Zuko still kind of felt like the Fire Nation had the superior culture. It wouldn’t last for long.

\----

A few days later, they had just finished eating dinner, when Katara let out a massive groan, and flopped into Sokka’s lap, her eyes drifting shut. “I’m so tired,” she whined, shocking them all. Katara almost never complained. But apparently, Sokka knew what this was.

“I’m with you,” he said, stifling a yawn, and absentmindedly reaching down to stroke his sister’s hair. “I vote we take a nap tomorrow, good old South Pole style.”

Katara opened her eyes to look up at him with wonder. “That is so smart. We have to do that. if we don’t I might cry.”

“Hey, Sugar Queen,” Toph cut in, a slight frown on her face. “Why are you so tired? We hardly did anything today.”

“I know,” Katara said, her face contorting in a massive yawn. “If we had, I might be less tired.”

Aang frowned, leaning forward. “Are you okay?” he asked, concern clear on his face. “That doesn’t sound normal.” As always, Aang’s accent caught him just a bit off guard. Aang said things differently,than anyone else he had ever heard, and even though his grammar was impeccable, the way he slid through his vowels so softly was still a bit strange.

Sokka shook his head with a slight grin. “No, this is totally normal. We are just South Pole people at heart.”

Aang looked puzzled for a second, before his mouth formed an o, and his expression lit up like a sunrise with recognition. “Oh,” he breathed. “It’s the light, isn’t it? It’s throwing you off.”

Sokka and Katara looked at each other, and then back at him. Katara let out a booming laugh, and Sokka shook his head in wonder. “Never let anyone tell you you aren’t smart,  _ shaimeke.  _ That’s quite a brain you’ve got in there.”

Aang blushed furiously, and shot Sokka a bashful grin.

“What?” Toph said. “Someone care to explain what in Spirit’s name those three are talking about?”

Sokka laughed and said, “Just because it’s summer here doesn’t mean it’s summer everywhere.”

Toph wrinkled her nose. “I’m really not in the mood for trying to puzzle out riddles. Give it to me straight.”

Katara rolled over from her spot in her brother’s lap to face Toph, her eyes drooping in a way Zuko rarely saw. “In the South Pole,” she said, “it’s winter right now. And winter in the South Pole is a lot darker. We call it the polar night, actually. The sun never even comes up above the horizon. It’s like night, but for three whole weeks instead of twelve hours. And the rest of summer is pretty dark, too, even if the sun does come up. So mostly what you do is just-” a yawn stretched her mouth so far he thought her jaw might just snap in half, “-sleep.”  
Sokka nodded, curling further into Katara’s warmth, casually undoing her braid and untangling it with his fingers. Katara shifted her head to allow him better access to the base of her braid, and practically melted into his hands. Something in Zuko’s chest moaned pitifully, embers of bitterness and jealousy and a kind of somber happiness flaring to life in his chest. (There was a time when Azula would have melted into him like that, like she was dying of the cold and he was the warmth of home. She had not done that in years, but he looks over this group, huddled close around their fire, and Katara shoots him a sleepy smile, and Suki is close enough that he can hear her breathing, and Toph’s feet are in his lap, and he wonders if this could be not so different after all.)

Aang looked curious. “But what else do you do? Isn’t it a little boring being stuck inside all day?”

“Yeah,” Toph said, “I can’t speak for you losers, but I’d go bonkers if I had to stay in one place for that long. Plus, snow.” She shuddered. “Bluck. No snow for me, thanks. I’d be blind!” She tipped her head back, and let out a cackling wheeze. “Well, more blind than usual.”

Sokka laughed, and shook his head. His fingers were still in Katara’s hair, but his smile was tired, and the skin around the corners of his eyes looked relaxed in a way Zuko hasn’t seen him look in days. Strange, that the way he pictures Sokka, pictures all of them really, is with smiles too tight, and stances too sharp, and eyes too haunted for their years. There is a casual cruelty in the fact that his mind’s image of these people is looking too old for their skins.  _ I hope that that is different someday.  _

“Being stuck inside is part of what makes it so great.”

Suki frowned at that. Zuko felt inclined to agree with her bewilderment. Being stuck inside was awful. What on earth could be great about it?

Katara seemed to read the confusion on their faces (which was a miracle in and of itself at this point, with how far closed her eyes were), and shifted, tapping the inside of her brother’s wrist. “They don’t get it,” she said. “You did a bad job explaining, and now they’re confused. Explain better.”

Sokka looked down at her, all soft smiles and adoration, and said, “What? You don’t want to explain?”

“No,” Katara grumbled, burrowing further into his lap. “Too comfy.”

Sokka stifled a laugh. Suki hid her snickers behind her hand. Rolling his eyes and practically dripping with fondness, Sokka looked up at them. “I get that for the rest of you, being stuck inside for three weeks sounds like a particularly cruel form of torture,” he said, not entirely inaccurately, “But for us it’s actually really nice. For so much of the year, everyone has to be doing something almost all the time. Hunting, or cooking, or doing building repairs. We spend so much time preparing for winter, and trying to stay alive, that when winter comes and we have nothing to do, we just get to spend time with our families. We get to lay around and be lazy. We can play board games and fight over stupid stuff like who left the blankets by the fire because now they smell like smoke. It’s a time to reconnect with the people that you love, and have fun with them in a way that you can’t for most of the rest of the year. Because of that, we call it  _ Hue Weamen Tewakel,  _ the warm night.”

The group sat digesting that for a moment, the only sounds the crickets and the crackle of the fire. A branch let out a particularly loud  _ pop,  _ and sprayed sparks a good three feet into the air, making all of them jump. Toph let out a few choice curse words. Zuko was pretty sure it would always be funny to him that the youngest person in their group besides Aang had the worst potty mouth. 

Suki shifted in her seat, smiling at the rapidly dissolving blob that was the combination of Water Tribe siblings. “Alright,” she said. “Now  _ that  _ actually sounds really nice.” She had the wistful look on her face that she always got when she thought about the Kyoshi warriors. 

Zuko knew this was only Suki’s second time in a group like this one, ready to die or kill for each other. But this was Zuko’s first. There was, he thought, something uniquely terrifying in the knowledge that you would shred the world down to its last fibers to keep a group of people safe. There was something terrifying in how quickly certain people could become a part of your identity, and that if they were gone, you wouldn’t really be whole anymore. There was something exhilarating in knowing that they felt the same way, a kind of unbelievable ecstasy in loving with no strings attached. These people were not his, they were not obligated to care about him. But for some reason, they still did. Sometimes it still knocked him breathless with how lucky he was.

Katara hummed, reaching up and yanking down one of Sokka’s hands toward her. She opened his fingers and dropped a kiss right in the middle of his palm, then curled her fingers around his wrist and started rubbing her thumb over the skin that covered the inside of his wrist, pulse against pulse. Sokka let out a deep hum in response, and shifted his other hand to scratch lightly at her scalp behind her ear. They both looked so open, so vulnerable. Like the other’s presence was automatically safety enough to be exactly as they were, no masks. Zuko suddenly felt as if he were intruding on a private moment. He looked away, as if his gaze would ruin this for them. (He knew it wouldn’t. They were family in a way that ran deeper than blood. They could never be ashamed of that. He wasn’t jealous. He  _ wasn’t _ .)

Murmuring under her breath, Katara slipped fully into her native language, her accent growing stronger and her dialect unfamiliar enough that even though Zuko was proficient in the language, he couldn’t really understand her at all. She said something to her brother, her eyes lazily flicking up to meet his, crinkled with a smile that her mouth was too busy talking to give. Sokka responded with a grin, and said something in a mischievous tone of voice. Katara looked at him like he was the smartest person in the world, and let out a laugh that shook her whole body, nodding furiously. 

Next to him, Suki sighed. “Those two are really something,” she said wonderingly. Aang nodded, and Zuko took note of the heavy curve to his shoulders, the way his eyes seemed to droop with a soul deep ache. It was familiar in a way that sent sharp pangs of guilt through his chest. Why was Aang jealous, he wondered? A smaller voice in his head whispered,  _ who is he mourning?  _

They sat in relative silence for a while, listening to the sounds of nature. Then Toph made a noise, so loud and grating that all of them jumped. They all turned to look at her. Katara half rose from her brother’s lap to look at the younger girl, a testament to her concern. “Toph?” Aang asked. “Are you okay?” The firelight shifted, and cast its flickering glow across her figure, shadows shifting with the steady rise and fall of her chest. She had fallen asleep right here, with her feet in Zuko’s lap. 

Zuko ignored the warmth twisting through him, and said “I didn’t know snores could sound like that.” 

Suki stifled a laugh, and said, “Well, I think we should all follow Ms. Beifong’s lead. It’s getting late, and I think Katara will be joining her if we sit here for another five minutes.” 

Katara just hummed a little, a smile curling at the edge of her lips. She didn't even bother trying to argue. Suki got up and scooped Toph up carefully, adjusting her stance to keep Toph’s head from rolling around. “I’ll take Miss Master Earthbender tonight,” she said quietly. Zuko stood up, brushing dirt off his pants and watching as Sokka attempted to persuade Katara to stop using his lap as a pillow and sleep in her own tent. It wasn’t going well. “Goodnight,” he said to the group.

“ ‘Night,” Aang murmured sleepily, trailing over to his sleeping bag. “See you in the morning.” 

“Wait,” Suki said, stopping just before her tent. “Who’s taking first watch?”

They had started taking watches after they left the Western Air Temple. Suki had been the one to actually suggest it, but he was pretty sure they had all felt the urge to do so. Any illusion of safety had shattered when they left the gravity-defying temple, and they had all been on edge since. So they had started taking turns with watches, sleeping off any extra exhaustion in the saddle the next day. 

“I’ll do it,” Zuko said quietly. “Who am I waking up next?”

“You can come and get me,” Sokka cut in, “if I ever manage to get this ice-slug off of me and into her own tent where there is a perfectly good sleeping bag waiting for her,” he said, poking Katara pointedly.

She groaned and finally rolled to her feet in a way reminiscent of a camelephant rousing from slumber, slow and grumpy. “Jerk,” she groaned, popping her back. She held out her hand and Sokka dropped her hair tie into it before climbing to his feet himself. He leaned down and the two of them brushed their foreheads together. Without saying a word, they pulled away and smiled at each other. Sokka ruffled her hair and she pushed him off with a groan, but she was still smiling as she turned away from him. “Goodnight,” she called over her shoulder, slipping into her tent with a yawn.

Barely a second later, Zuko felt a tightness begin to spread through his jaw. Internally cursing her for yawning while she was still outside, he clenched his jaw shut and waited for it to pass. Suki murmured her goodnights, ducking into her tent with Toph still snoring in her arms, and Sokka echoed her, shooting him a tired smile before ducking into his tent.

Zuko stood in the empty camp for a second, listening to the croaks of the badgerfrogs. Then he sat down facing out into the darkness, and allowed himself to wonder how this became his world. Smiles and goodnight wishes and laughter that was feverishly contagious. Trips to the market with a girl younger and kinder than him, who bought certain spices even though he knew she hated them because  _ he _ liked them , firebending training with a boy who seemed more air than human, tiny gestures all the time, from a group of children as broken and war torn as he was, that still found time to live in the margins of the stories they were writing, declarations of love in every teasing word that were never really cruel at all. He let himself wonder, and let himself be terrifyingly ecstatic, that he could call this group of broken, brilliant children home. 

(The masters showed him that fire can be more than destruction and pain. It can be life, and healing, and love. And, Agni, does he love them. He loves them with all the heat in his veins, all the pounding of his pulse. His fire has never burned so fiercely.)

( _Love is ferocious,_ Uncle told him once. _It is a fire that cannot be quenched, a fever that cannot be broken._ He understands that now. He is burning, in a way he would never trade for anything.)

The next morning, Katara cooks a breakfast soup, a wonderfully strange mix of Earth Kingdom spices and the ocean. 

In the palace, everything was cooked in the kitchen. He never really thought about how it was made. He would sit at gold rimmed tables on silk cushions, the silence stifling him. The food came to him, finished, tasting like decadence and effortlessness and his Fire Nation heritage. He sits in the dirt and watches Katara cook breakfast soup over an earthbent firepit, puzzling at spices for five minutes before using a little of all of them. She has them taste it to tweak the flavor as she works, feeding them straight from the spoon still curled in her fingers, and everyone is talking, loud and fast and full of happiness. Aang says it needs more cilantro. Sokka swears she should put fireflakes in it. Zuko says he thinks it is perfect. She adds something else seven times before she is satisfied, and then she doles it out, leaving Zuko wondering how she made it taste even more perfect. Suki tastes it and tells Katara she should open a cafe. Katara laughs. Zuko eats his soup. It tastes like hard work and careful attention and a strange, beautiful blend of two cultures he has no claim to. It is one of the most wonderful things he has ever tasted. 

He wants to tell her  _ this tastes like a home I didn’t know,  _ and  _ I can feel the ocean and the earth in this,  _ and  _ thank you for showing me how amazing your foods are _ , and  _ I can tell how hard you worked on this and I love it even more for that.  _ But he doesn’t know how to get any of that past his tightening throat, so he says, “This is amazing, Katara,” and hopes she can see the words in his face. 

She smiles at him with soft eyes and says, “Thanks, Zuko,” and he knows she can.

They eat all of the breakfast soup, because they have no way to keep it, and Katara will make lunch for them to eat in the saddle. Katara and Aang train for about an hour, and then they come back, and Aang goes off with Toph, and Katara enlists Zuko to start up the fire again to start cooking lunch. Sokka and Suki, who had been sparring with each other a few yards away from the campsite, eased their way into a stop, and did a few stretches before walking back into camp. This was the routine they had settled into. They would train in the morning, and Katara would cook lunch while the rest of them did their part to pack and clean up camp, they would fly for most of the afternoon, pick a spot to camp, set up, and then have one massive group spar before dinner and bed. It was an unspoken rule in the group that they picked an easily defensible location to camp, preferably with lots of bendables for Toph and Katara, just in case. 

(War had left its marks on all of them, in ways that ran deeper than surface scars, and at the end of the day, they are planning for every contingency.  _ Better cautious than regretful,  _ Suki had said once with a bitter smile, staring down at Aang snoring away in her lap.  _ And better paranoid than dead.  _ He is inclined to agree with her.)

When Aang got back from Toph’s training, groaning about how between Toph, Katara, and Zuko he had enough bruises to paint the palace of Ba Sing Se black and blue, Zuko got up from where he had been seated enjoying Katara’s cooking self-commentary, and the two of them left to do firebending. Aang flew through the training exercises, and Zuko marveled at how quickly he was picking it up. When Zuko had mentioned his incredible speed to him once, Aang had grinned at him and said “Well, you know, this is only like my four hundred and somethingth time doing this,” and Zuko hadn’t forgotten it since.

When they finished, they walked back towards the camp to find that the others had completely finished packing. Katara had snuffed out the fire and was wrapping a still steaming something in cloth, and Sokka, Suki, and Toph were wandering the campsite, trying to erase any signs of human habitation. It seemed like Suki and Katara were the only ones being actually productive though, because Sokka and Toph were crouched in a dirt pile, throwing handfuls of earth at each other and arguing. From the bits of conversation he was hearing, (“Toph, you are so wrong!  _ Juenik  _ is amazing! It’s not our fault you were born with bad taste buds!) it didn’t seem to be terribly important.

“Hi!” Aang called out, bouncing up to the others. How he still had the energy to bounce after four and a half hours of training, Zuko had no idea. “Are we ready to go?”

“Almost,” Katara said, putting the wrapped mystery foods into a basket together, and latching it shut. “Suki and Sokka already put all the luggage in the saddle. We just need to erase Appa’s footprints and the firepit, and then we should be all good.” 

“Okay,” Aang said. Twisting around to face Sokka and Toph, who were still throwing dirt at each other and arguing over the quality of Water Tribe spices, he called, “Toph! Do you want footprints or the firepit?”

Toph threw one last handful of dirt, managing to land some of it directly in Sokka’s mouth, leaving him spitting and cursing, then turned around and called, “Footprints.” She slammed one foot on the ground, and the dozens of footprints strewn across the campsite all popped back up into normal positions at once. 

Zuko knew he was a good bender. He was. Even if he wasn’t as good as Azula (even if he would never be as good as Azula), there were still very few people who could best him in a fight. And somehow, these children, (warriors and fighters and talented strategists, but still children,) were on that list. It only made him feel like he was standing at the edge of a cliff staring into endless space some days. 

(Someday, he hopes, he will know them as adults. Bruised and scarred and covered in burns that won’t ever heal, because some things never do, but happy and alive and grown up. Someday, he hopes, he will be able to smile at these children he calls family in the safety of his mind, and he will be able to do it without wondering if they will still be there to smile back after the next fight.)

Somehow, they managed to all end up in Appa’s saddle with only minimal shouting from Katara and himself. As he shouts at Toph to stop covering Sokka with dirt, and Katara shouts at Sokka to stop giving Toph a wedgie, he wonders how he became an unofficial guardian sharing custody of three morons with a fourteen year old girl. He marvels at the fact that he wouldn’t change any of it for the world. 

Aang guides Appa into the air, and as soon as Aang does the strange thing with his fingers that parts the air around the saddle like a bubble, that Zuko refuses to admit still amazes him every time, they begin settling in for the long haul. Katara passes out sandwiches that taste like cloves and swamp spices and the sea. Katara hands one to Toph and says, “I left the  _ jeunik  _ off of yours. I know you hate it, even though that is ridiculous.” Toph’s head turns in the direction of Katara’s voice, and Katara pushes her bangs back, dropping a kiss right on her hairline before leaving to go give Aang his sandwich. Toph looks down at her sandwich, and Zuko knows the expression on her face. Has worn it. The awe, the disbelief, the twisting, stinging warmth that sits low in your stomach and curls up through your chest. Warm and disbelieving because how can they care so much, know you so well after so little time? He knows that it stings, too, though, because if this is love, this warmth that feels so much like home, where has it been this whole time? Why did the other people you loved not love you enough to care like this?

Katara walks back, and she makes a joke and nudges Toph’s arm, and shoots him a grin so vast he could drown in it, and he knows that he would choose this over the people that chose not to choose him anyday, even if it comes with the stings, because he is so warm he almost cannot remember the cold. Love is a fire that cannot be quenched, Uncle told him. And fire can come from love, too. Zuko thinks that Katara would have made an excellent firebender. She has so much love to give.

Katara finished her sandwich, and then snapped her fingers at Sokka. Sokka looked up from his conversation with Suki, and grinned at her, nodding. Katara got up and walked up to where Aang was still steering.

Immediately, Zuko was on edge. The only thing scarier than Sokka and Katara fighting was Sokka and Katara working in tandem. Back when he was still chasing them around the globe, he learned this the hard way. There had been an incident with a tea shop, a molotov cocktail, a small herd of badgerbats, and a rather impressive paint spill that, in combination, led to what may have been the most humiliating episode in his entire career, which was really saying something. He didn’t think he would ever forget Sokka’s maniacal laugh, or the evil gleam in Katara’s eyes when he made the one wrong step that kickstarted their whole plan. Since then, he had treated the two of them working together as a bomb primed and ready to go off.

He leaned over to Sokka, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What are you two up to?”

In response, Sokka just laughed, which really only made Zuko more worried. His worry only increased when Katara came back with Aang in tow. “Relax,” she was saying to the younger boy, “Appa knows the drill. He’ll be fine steering for a while.” Aang looked dubious, but he agreed. 

“Okay, seriously,” Zuko said. “What are you two up to?”

Katara grinned at him and tipped her chin up, her blue eyes catching the sun like shards of fire. “Why, introducing you to a bit of Water Tribe culture, of course!” she said enthusiastically. 

“We can’t bring the darkness, but we can bring the sleeping,” Sokka said with a grin. With a dramatic  _ whoosh _ , he pulled a blanket from his bag. “Katara and I are going to be temporarily observing  _ Hue Weamen Tewakel,  _ and we would be honored if you would bless us with your participation.”

Katara pulled out another blanket, rolling her eyes at her brother’s theatrics. “We’re doing a penguin pile nap,” she said with a grin. “You are all officially welcome to join us.” She crawled over to her brother, yanking at the edge of his blanket and sliding underneath, practically glueing herself to his side. 

“Penguin pile?” Toph laughed. “You sound ridiculous, Sugar Queen.”

“Oh,” Sokka said haughtily. “Well, then, Katara, I guess we know who isn’t allowed under the blanket.”

Aang laughed, his face lighting up like the sun clearing the horizon. “Really?!” he exclaimed. “We can do it, too?!”

Katara nodded, and lifted her edge of the blanket, grinning at him. Aang let out a cry of delight, and dove for the blanket. He curled up, burying himself in Katara’s side, and burrowing as far under the blanket as he could. 

Toph huffed angrily, turning her nose up. “Well, I don’t need to do that anyway. You can keep your smelly blanket to yourself.” Zuko could hear the faint chords of insecurity in her voice.   
Maybe Katara could too, because she laughed gently, and said, “He was kidding. And if it makes you feel better, _my_ blanket isn’t stinky at all. You can use that one.”

Toph wavered, but she didn’t move, as if she was waiting for them to rescind their invitation. So Katara stood up and yanked Toph in, dropping her next to Aang, and throwing her own blanket over them. Aang doubled over laughing, and curled an arm around Toph. The earthbender huffed, but sank into his embrace anyway. 

“Alright,” Suki said, climbing under Sokka’s edge of the blanket. “I need in on this action.” Sokka let out an exultant noise of triumph, and tugged Suki in closer, weaving their fingers together and kissing her. Katara met Zuko’s eyes and made a face. Zuko stifled a giggle as Sokka turned to her, smacking her shoulder lightly. Katara smacked him back, and he smacked her again, and the two of them dissolved into a slap battle, yelping and cackling and tussling under the blanket. “I thought this was supposed to be about loving and appreciating your family,” Suki said, her voice dripping with amusement. 

“It is,” Katara yelled, smacking Sokka upside the head.

“Yeah!” Sokka agreed loudly, putting Katara in a headlock and aggressively messing up her hair. “Can’t you tell how much we love each other?”

Aang and Toph started cracking up, Aang narrating the fight to her, both of them grinning from ear to ear. Suki shook her head fondly. “All right, enough!” Katara shrieked as Sokka began assaulting her sides with his fingers. She curled into a ball, her shoulders shaking with laughter as she tried to fend off his tickles. “All right, you win!”

“VICTORY!” Sokka yelled, pumping his fists before dropping down next to her, both of them still laughing hysterically. He tugged her into his side again, and she tried to smooth down her ruffled hair.

Aang slid back into Katara’s side, tugging Toph along with him, and Suki slid into Sokka’s, shaking her head and bemusedly saying, “How did I fall for such a moron?”

Sokka gasped dramatically, his eyes widening. “Clearly you are not talking about your boyfriend, who is  _ very  _ intelligent and i _ ncredibly  _ mature, so I must meet this moron who has captured your heart!”

Katara snorted. Suki laughed, smacking his arm and then kissing his nose. Aang peeked his head up from the blanket, where Zuko was pretty sure he and Toph were having a poking contest. “Zuko, are you coming?” he said, grinning like a sunset over the ocean. 

Zuko tried to protest, but then Toph popped up, saying, “Yeah, Sparky. Even I’m doing it. Think of it as a team building exercise.”

Zuko tried to protest, but the others started chiming in with encouragement and pleading, and oh Agni, there were Aang’s puppy eyes, and Katara was wheedling him, and Suki was gesturing at him to come on, and Sokka was yelling about how he better do it, or he would think of it in regret on his deathbed, and the stinging was gone, drowned under the flood of love, and want, and the sheer euphoria of  _ they want me in their lives, they care, I love them them and they love me back, no strings attached _ , and then he was climbing under the blanket next to Suki, and the others were cheering so loud he thought his eardrums would burst. 

Growing up, he was taught that the other cultures were inferior, barbaric and deserving of correction. He lies under a blanket on a sky bison with children from every nation but his own, and gets into a poke war with a Water Tribe boy and a Kyoshi warrior. He falls asleep there, under Agni’s light and a blanket of Water Tribe blues, observing a Water Tribe tradition. He wakes up there hours later, Sokka drooling on his shoulder, Toph laying diagonally across three of their laps, Aang curled in Katara’s arms, Suki sandwiched between himself and Katara, one arm curled under her head and the other around his shoulders. Katara’s hair tickles his chin, and there is a damp spot on his shirt from Sokka’s drool, and Toph is snoring away in his lap. 

He wakes up with them, and their group is all tangled limbs and mingled breaths, and he cannot tell where any of them end and the others begin, and he doesn’t move. He shifts Sokka’s head so he won’t wake up with a crick in his neck, and he brushes some of Katara’s hair from Suki’s face, and he listens to their breathing, slow and steady. He breathes the same air as these people that chose him because they cared about him. He wonders how he got so lucky. 

(He thinks of Uncle, and wishes he could tell him,  _ I did it Uncle. I did it. I found this. I found these people, or they found me. I did it, Uncle. I made a home, all on my own. It’s broken, and full of cracks, and it is so beautiful.  _ He hopes that he will get to tell him someday.)

\---

The sun was setting, dripping red and orange and yellow over the clouds and treeline. And Suki and Toph were dancing.

Well, Zuko called it dancing. Really it was more like fast, choreographed stretching. It had an official name, he was sure. In fact, he had a vague memory of discussing these dances with Shao-Xi so many years ago. But he couldn’t remember what they were called.

He watched Suki swing in a graceful arc, dipping her chest and arching one leg up nearly vertical towards the sky. At the same time, Toph tipped her chest backwards, placing one hand on the group behind her and swinging one foot over the ground. They had done this for as long as the six of them had been back together. Every day, in the afternoon, the two of them would find an open area and do their strangely graceful dances. Sometimes he watched them do so, transfixed by the careful, sweeping movements, confident and unmovable. He knew it was of cultural significance to them, which made him feel a little bad about it, but mostly he just loved watching them because it was beautiful.

Suki stood up and leaned forward, rolling her body in a way that reminded him of the snake-owls that flew through the fruit forests near the Southern Air Temple, swinging her leg in a circle above her. Then her head twisted towards him and she called, “Zuko! Come here.”

He froze. He really had thought he was being sneaky about creeping on them, but Mai had told him once that he had about as much stealth as a drunk camelephant. The one exception to this rule had been when he was the Blue Spirit, but in all other situations, Mai’s analysis was proving to be fairly accurate. Since ignoring Suki when she spoke directly to you was akin to flirting with Lady Death herself, he got up and slowly walked towards the two of them, his shoulders hunched and his feet dragging. His stomach had twisted itself into knots that were stubbornly refusing to come undone, and it really wasn’t helping his nerves.

When he reached Suki, he took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could even begin, she said, “Why have you been obsessively watching us do the  _ Yegatar  _ every day?”

Ah, so that was what it was called.  _ Yegatar _ . Now that Suki had said it, he could remember clear as day. “Um,” he said, fumbling over his words, “I was just… I just kind of thought it would be a good… a good, um-” Inwardly, he began cursing himself with all the fervor of a dying sinner repenting. Why could he angrily monologue to people that he hated like a famous writer with too much to say, but when he tried to explain things to his friends, he stumbled over himself like there was no tomorrow? A voice that sounded like Uncle’s whispered,  _ Because what your friends think of your actions matter to you.  _

“Spit it out, Sparky,” Toph said, crossing one arm over the other in an attempt to stretch it. Suki raised one eyebrow expectantly.

His heart pounding in his throat, he blurted, “It looks cool.”

Suki and Toph both twisted to look at him. Well, Suki twisted to look at him. Toph twisted to better follow his voice. Before his urge to explain completely abandoned him, he continued. “It looks really cool, like dancing, but slower and more coordinated, and I know that it’s important to your cultures and everything, and I’m trying to learn more about those, because, well, I just don’t want to have to think like they taught me anymore, and I’m here with you all, and want to know more, I don’t want to be blind to the rest of the world anymore, I want to be able to see that your cultures have cool stuff, too.” 

Oops. That was far more than he meant to say. But even though the words had come out like thorn branches, bloody and scratched, and dripping with insecurity, even though he had said too much, but at the same time not enough, even if he hadn’t told them everything, he had told them  _ something _ , and that had to count, one way or another.  _ To love is to be vulnerable _ , Uncle told him once, and Zuko hadn’t listened to him then, but he was listening now. He had laid a part of himself bare, to two of the very few people that held his heart in their cupped, blueblack hands, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that Uncle would be proud of him for that.

Suki and Toph stared at him for a few seconds, and then Suki laughed, loud and dripping with fondness. She glanced over at Toph, grinning. “Why do I get the feeling he thinks we are going to be mad at him for this?”

Toph snorted. “Sparky,” she said, blunt as ever, “If you wanted to know about the dances you should have just asked us. Stupid.”

Zuko stared at her in shock. “You’re okay with it?”

Suki rolled her eyes. “Yes, you incomprehensible moron, we are okay with you wanting to know more about our cultures.” She laughed again, shaking her head incredulously. “For someone so smart, you can be pretty dumb sometimes.” She tipped her head at him, a smile curving up the side of her lips. “Would you like to join us?”

Zuko short circuited. “You want me… to join you?” 

Suki nodded, and Toph smacked her hand on her forehead. “We wouldn’t invite you, Sparky, if we didn’t want you to,” she groaned.

“But… I don’t know how,” he said.

Suki grabbed his hand and tugged him forwards. “So we’ll teach you. I think this might actually help you a lot.”

Suki and Toph adjusted his stance, Suki with gentle nudges, and Toph with punches and yelling. They guided him through the sequences, slow and steady. He took deep breaths, like a firebender, and kept his feet planted, rooted to the ground like an earthbender. Suki and Toph showed him moves, how to stay grounded with his feet, with his hands, with his breathing. He never knew that earthbending relied on breathing, too, but he thinks about Uncle, drawing symbols of four different nations in the dirt, and thinks maybe they aren’t so different after all. 

Suki and Toph explain  _ Yegatar.  _ “ _ Yegatar _ ,” Suki says, “Is a series of dances designed to test the limits of your body’s endurance, while allowing you to think about yourself. After enough times, going through the motions of the dances becomes muscle memory, and you are free to think entirely about yourself, while letting your body do the work.” She stretched backwards, tipping so that her hands brushed to dirt just inches behind her heels in a display of flexibility Zuko knew he couldn’t replicate. “Inner turmoil is one of the many ways to allow the world to get the best of you.  _ Yegatar  _ counteracts that by giving you daily time to reflect over the events of your recent life that have affected you, and allowing you to begin to come to terms with how you change from day to day, so that the world cannot catch you unaware of who you have become when you make an unusual choice.”

Toph rose from a stance where she was bent over, one hand brushing her toes and the curled around her other foot twisted behind her back, and said, “A big part of earthbending is being as steady and unmovable as the foundation of the earth. If you are not as stubborn as the rock, it won’t listen to you. The world is the same way. If you aren’t confident in your knowledge of yourself, it will push you, and not the other way around. The dances let you realize who you have become, who the world has shaped you to be now, and who you aren’t anymore. It lets you gain confidence from your understanding of yourself, and allows you to face the world head on. That’s important to our culture, and it’s important to us too, so don’t you forget it, Sparky.”

Zuko does  _ Yegatar.  _ He trips and stumbles through the motions Suki and Toph make look effortless, and they laugh. Not at him, but with him, because he is laughing too, and when he falls over, they pick him up again, and help him face it head on, each time a little more prepared than the last. He thinks of Fao-Veng, and wishes he could spit in his smug face, because this is beautiful, and  _ they  _ are beautiful, and he stumbles and trips and fails to be graceful, and Toph and Suki laugh, but they help him up, too, and show him how to do better next time, and they are better at this than he is by miles, but all three of them are covered in dirt and sweat and the fading light of the setting sun, and all three of them are laughing, and he wonders how anyone could think this was inferior.

They finish  _ Yegatar,  _ and go back into camp, and Sokka snickers at how dirt-coated he is, and Katara clenches her nose shut and groans about how all three of them need a bath, and he cannot bring himself to be insulted, because it was worth every piece of dust caked on him. Suki and Toph give him a standing invitation to join them again. 

He takes them up on it. He slowly memorizes dances, and slips in the dirt a thousand times, and gets up a thousand and one times. He finds himself, in the sweat and the dirt and the fading light, and the breathing of two people who hold his heart in their cupped, blueblack hands. And he cannot believe he ever thought this could be anything but wonderful.

\-----

It was official. Blue Sun Bog was one of his new top-ten least favorite places on the planet, right up there with the official sparring ring for royal Agni Kais, and that one bearbee hive he got stuck in once. 

They were almost to Ember Island, so close to relative safety, so close to sleeping in a house with walls, where you didn’t have to worry about raccoonfoxes attacking you when it was your turn to do the dishes, because apparently raccoonfoxes will settle for human food or human blood, but nothing else. Okay, that was maybe an exaggeration. Logically, he knew they had to eat something else in the wild, too, but when he had tried to help clean the dishes, and a raccoonfox had screamed at him, clawing him with sharp little talons until he had dropped the pot and ran, he had been scarred for life, and was now convinced raccoonfoxes were sources of pure, undiluted evil.

Anyway. 

Apparently flying nonstop with six humans on your back could be tiring, because as they had started over Blue Sun Bog, Appa had let out a pitiful moan so loud he startled a whole flock of birds from a tree. Aang had promptly found the next open clearing, and landed, and when Sokka asked him why he had stopped, Aang had explained that a groan like that was Appa’s last warning to land before his passengers would severely regret it. “Do you remember when Azula was chasing us?” He had said, his mouth set in a grimace. “Something tells me we don’t want a repeat of that incident.”

Sokka, Katara, Aang, and Toph had all shuddered in unison. “Okay,” Sokka said. “Yeah, making camp sounds good.” Katara and Toph muttered agreements under their breath, and went to start setting up. 

“Okay,” Suki had said, “You can’t leave the two of us hanging like this. What could have happened that was so bad it could make you all have  _ that  _ reaction?”

Aang had narrated a rather colorful story for them then, which involved Appa’s excessive shedding, a terror chase machine, Azula’s girl gang, far too much sleep deprivation, and Appa falling asleep in midair with all of them still on board. After that, Suki and Zuko had agreed that camping here sounded far better than that. But he was thinking of rescinding that statement now. Because if one more Agni-damned mosquitoflea bit him, he was actually going to burn down this whole spirits-forsaken bog in a bout of fiery vengeance. He shifted again, sticky sweat making his blankets cling to him uncomfortably. And then-  _ chomp.  _

With a strangled cry of rage, he bolted upright, ripping off his blanket and shooting a tiny stream of flame at his leg. He ended up singeing himself, but that damn mosquitoflea was burnt to a smoking crisp, so who’s the real winner here? “That’s right,” he snarled at the dead insect, “ _ Die _ , you thrice-damned, honey-licking, pepper-blowing parasite. May all your children meet a fiery end, and your race go as dead as your royal awfulness deserves. I  _ HATE YOU!”  _ He rolled to his feet, and stormed out of his tent, fully intent on tracking down every mosquitoflea nest he could find, and burning them into nothingness like they deserved. He didn’t count on running into Aang. 

He stormed past Katara’s tent, and stopped dead. He twisted his head around and tipped his good ear towards the direction of the noise that had caught his attention. Was that… singing? He trailed closer, his plans of becoming the best mosquitoflea killer in the world fading as the noise grew louder. That was definitely singing. Who was singing in the dead of night in a mosquito infested bog? Then he recognized the words, or rather, realized he didn’t recognize them. There was only one person in the whole world who spoke like that, in a language as dead as dust.

He trailed into the clearing to see Aang sitting on a large rock, swaying in time with his song. Listening to Aang speak in his native tongue was like watching a sunrise of colors that didn’t exist. Vowels that in other languages would have been sharp and jagged were smooth and rounded, and all of his words bled into one another like they were not really separate at all. To be honest, Zuko hadn’t ever even thought about the Air Nomads having another language, hadn’t devoted a second of thought to Aang’s unusual accent until he first heard Aang speak in words that seemed carved specifically for his tongue, like rivers and wind through trees, never stopping, and with a strange lyrical pulse to it that made it sound more like singing than speech. He had heard Aang speak words that were strange and beautiful and damningly unfamiliar, and a hot wave of guilt and grief had rushed through him, along with a familiar chorus of  _ your fault, your fault, your fault,  _ in his head. A whole language, that only Aang remembered. Just one more thing on the list of the Fire Nation’s sins. What an awful legacy. Not the creation of something wonderful, but the destruction of thousands of wonderful things, something that can never be taken back or truly remedied.

He stood there for a minute, listening to Aang sing, wishing in that moment more than anything that he could understand. Aang stopped, looking down at his lap. He could leave. He could leave Aang to this moment of silence and grief, undisturbed. He could walk away now, and let Aang mourn in the safety of solitude. (And he knows Aang is mourning. He is not naive. Aang is always mourning.) But before he could, Aang shifted to the language of the Fire Nation, and said, “Hi, Zuko.”

Zuko winced internally. “Hi yourself,” he said awkwardly.

Aang twisted to look at him, and even from here Zuko could see the tear tracks on his face, shining in the moonlight. “You don’t just have to stand there,” he said softly. “I don’t bite.”

Zuko’s heart throbbed in his chest, as he thought of everything Aang had lost, all of the justification he could use to treat him terribly, but never does. Never will. Aang is a better person than Zuko will ever be, he thinks. “I know,” he said quietly. He walked over and climbed up to sit next to Aang, hearing the silent invitation that was more like a plea.  _ Don’t leave me here alone,  _ his silence whispers, and the fire burning in Zuko’s chest cannot deny him this. 

They sat in silence for a while, breathing in tandem. Aang’s eyes were closed, tears silently leaking down his cheeks, and not for the first time, Zuko wished he was more like Katara. Wished he was better with comfort, better with knowing how to be there for someone in a way that didn’t just add pressure to bruise. 

Aang took in a breath larger than his others, and opened his eyes, shooting Zuko a watery smile. “Did you know,” he said softly, “that this bog is sacred to us?” Zuko knew what he meant by us, the Air Nomads that weren’t here anymore. Part of Zuko wondered if Aang felt abandoned sometimes. The other part of him was now very glad that he had not followed up on his promise to burn down the bog. Aang continued. “It isn’t sacred because there are spirits we worship here, or because any important Air Nomad was born here, its… it's sacred because of the animals.”

Zuko blinked. “You think mosquitofleas are sacred?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wanted to slap himself. Aang was opening up to him about something deathly important to him, and he was saying things that might be disrespectful? Why was he so  _ bad  _ at this?

But Aang just laughed, and Zuko breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn’t offended. “No. Well, yes, them too. They are living, so they are sacred because all life is sacred. But I was more talking about… Just watch.” 

Aang tipped his head back, took a deep breath, and started to sing. It was a different song than before, but just as beautiful. Aang got through the second verse, and then the trees shifted. The leaves rustled, and the croaking of the badgerfrogs stopped, and Zuko could swear the world around them held its breath to listen. Aang finished his song, and the world held still around them, breathing in synchrony with his heart, beating loud in his throat. And then, something in a nearby tree hummed. Another hum joined it, and another, and another, until the trees were singing a thrumming chord that resonated in his lungs and his bones, filling him with noise. A figure leapt from a tree, and shot down, landing in Aang’s outstretched hands. Zuko recoiled. Aang was holding a hummingbirdsnake. 

Famously hard to catch, and famously impossible to tame, hummingbirdsnakes were more of a legend than anything. And Aang was holding one in his small hands. Actually, he was holding a lot more than one. While Zuko’s brain had gone through a vicious cycle of  _ that can’t be what I think it is,  _ and  _ oh Agni, that is definitely a hummingbirdsnake,  _ and then back to  _ that CANNOT BE WHAT I THINK IT IS,  _ dozens of the creature, ranging in size from fifteen feet to barely as long as his pinky, had risen from the trees to mob the tiny monk. They curled around his neck, and his chest, and draped themselves over his arms, and coiled up in his lap, and flew in dizzying circles around him, all of them humming with sheer joy. Somewhere beneath the garlands of hummingbirdsnakes he was wearing, Aang was laughing with a brilliant glee. Frankly, the boy's laughter was the only thing keeping these animals from eating flames, because if Zuko hadn’t known that Aang was enjoying this (HOW was he enjoying this) he would have thought the winged creatures were trying to consume him. 

Aang peeled a hummingbirdsnake off his face, gently unwinding it from over his eyes, giggling hysterically. Breathless from laughter, he said, “They have generational memory. The stories say that once an Air Nun rescued a baby and raised it. She would sing that song to it, and when she released it, it had babies that could remember it too. Eventually so many of them interbred that most of the population remembers the song, and if you sing it they still respond.  _ These  _ are what make this place sacred. It’s this idea of, show someone consistent kindness, and they will remember you. I think it’s really awesome.” He tipped his head at Zuko, in a way that reminded him of a curious bird. The sight of him almost completely obscured by hummingbirdsnakes was so strangely hysterical Zuko almost broke down howling right there. “Do you want to try?” Aang asked.

It took a few seconds for his question to sink in, and then Zuko was convinced Aang had completely lost his marbles. “Are you crazy?” he exclaimed. “And get smothered to death? No thank you. They’d eat me alive.”

“They will  _ not  _ eat you alive,” Aang said. “Airbender’s honor.” 

Zuko was about to say,  _ You’re totally crazy, I’m going to bed, see you in the morning when the world makes sense again.  _ But then he thought about  _ Yegatar _ , the strange wonder it possessed, and how he never thought he would do that, either. He looked down at Aang’s lap, at his small hand scratching behind the jaw of a beaked head bigger than a salad bowl, the hummingbirdsnake’s eyes shut as it practically purred with satisfaction, and he wonders if this will be something he regrets saying no to in the future. He thinks it might be, and that is enough for him to meet Aang’s eyes and say, “I may live to regret this, but I guess I can try.” Aang’s smile makes it worth it. 

Aang sings the song, half speed, enunciating every word clearly, every time Zuko asks him to sing it again. The words that sound like honey and melted chocolate on Aang’s tongue sound clumsy and faltering on Zuko’s. He gets embarrassed, and more than once thinks of just calling it quits, but something in Aang’s eager expression stops him every time he thinks about leaving. It takes Zuko five tries to get through the whole song. It is stumbling, and slow. It sounds too sharp and too separated to be a native speaker singing, and more than once he has to look over at Aang to read mouthed words on his lips, because he’d forgotten the next verse. It is not pretty, but he gets through it. Past the pounding of his heartbeat, he cannot even hear that the world has fallen silent to listen.

He finishes, and for the span of five heartbeats, the clearing is silent. Then, with a sound like a thousand cello strings being plucked at once, the hummingbirdsnakes descend. They coil around his limbs, his torso, his face, wings beating and tails swinging, warm scales and soft feathers and a humming so loud his bones vibrate under his skin. Aang is laughing, and Zuko is gasping, and any semblance of sense disappears under the sheer terrified exhilaration flooding his body. The hummingbirdsnakes are warm, and he realized he was expecting them to be cold. They aren’t. Not even close. 

Even under the pale moonlight, he can tell that they are thousands of different colors, sparkling like jewels in the thin light. They wrap around him, warm and solid and real, and when one shoves its beaked head under his hand, blinking up at him with wide eyes and humming insistently, he laughs. He scratches the hummingbirdsnake’s head, and he listens to the humming in her chest. Instinctively, he starts humming, too. 

He looks over at Aang in wonder, and Aang looks back at him, grinning, and for a split second, he can forget who he is, who they are, what they have done, and what they have yet to do. For a second they are just two boys covered in creatures that are magical in all but name, laughing under the moonlight.

The moment ends eventually, as everything does, and the hummingbirdsnakes leave to go find their nests and sleep away the rest of the night. Aang wipes his cheeks, and smiles at Zuko, wide and melancholy and full of hope and love and everything that makes Zuko believe that someday all these scars and bruises will be worth it. “Thank you,” Zuko says, and his voice is raspy with use and some nameless emotion curling through his veins, powerful and wonderful and aching. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I can see why they are sacred to you.” 

Suddenly, he can’t quite find the same primal hatred of this place that he had before.

Aang smiles at him, and shifts closer, and drops his head on Zuko’s shoulder, leaning into his side. Zuko holds his breath and fights the tightness in his lungs, fights the stinging in his eyes. 

This is still new to him, this kind of endless trust. He keeps waiting for them all to run out of patience for him, to realize he isn’t worth it, to stop giving the love that they have seemingly endless supplies of. But they don’t. It keeps coming, and coming, and coming, endless, and worth more than anything else in the world. They love him until he thinks he could drown in the feelings of rightness, of home, and then they love him some more. And he loves them back, with all the fire in his soul, enough to burn down the world, or light up the sky with its brilliance. 

(He used to think Agni burned with rage. He must, to be so bright. Lately, he thinks that Agni must burn with love, endless and eternal, because he has found it is so infinitely brighter than rage.)

Later, he will lie awake at night and think about how the words of a language all but dead sat on his tongue, clumsy and beautiful, and glittering scales that filled the air like stars pulled down from the sky, and he will think of Fao-Veng. Of how wrong he was. He will think of his friends, rich and diverse, and not Fire Nation at all, at he will wonder how he could have ever believed his culture to be better than theirs. 

But for now, he wraps an arm around Aang, and tips his head up to watch the stars. They breathe in tandem, bruised and bleeding and alive, and under the moonlight, that is enough.

\----

They win. It feels wrong to say. It feels hollow, and false. He doesn’t feel like they’ve really won anything, just beaten the odds at the latest game of fate’s design. But they  _ have  _ won. Part of him is grieving, for a family that was never really his, that was never even a family. The rest of him is celebrating, bittersweet and burning with love, and hope, and everything that makes all the bruises and scars worth it, because the family he found, and made, and chose, the family that chose him back, is still breathing the same air as him, still living, still being. And that makes it worth it.

\----

Fire Lord Zuko rescinds all of the banishments Sozin, Azulon, and Ozai made for treachery to the throne. Some of the people are already dead, and he issues a formal apology to them. He knows it won’t help t _ hem _ anymore, but history tends to forget semantics, and if he makes everyone see that this was a mistake, then the generations of the future will be that much closer to understanding the truth. 

He sends messages to every large Earth Kingdom town, telling them that any former Fire Nation citizens banished under Ozai’s rule were welcome to return if they wished. And he also asked for one person in particular. If they were still alive, Fire Lord Zuko wished to speak with them personally.

Shao-Xi arrived at the Fire Nation Palace three months later, carrying a copy of a letter he sent to every large town, addressed specifically to her. A formal request for a private conversation by the Fire Lord himself. 

Officially, Shao-Xi is no longer a traitor, but many of the nobles are still loyal to Ozai, and they sneer when she walks in with her head held high. Shao-Xi looks the same. Her hair is pulled back in a flawless topknot, and though there are a few more lines on her face, and a few gray streaks in her hair, she still looks every bit the woman he remembers. 

Zuko comes out to greet her, and she does a formal bow, addressing him as Fire Lord Zuko, and he horrifies some nearby nobles by bowing right back to her, and calling her  _ enhaou kai _ . He doesn’t care. Her eyes sparkle with something like shock, and, he hopes, pride. He invites her to speak in his office, and she graciously accepts.

If Shao-Xi is shocked to find the Avatar and a group of children wearing formal clothes of diplomats waiting in his office for them, it doesn’t show. She asks for names, and greets each of them in the customs of their respective nations. Sokka’s jaw drops when she offers him her forearm, and Aang damn near starts crying when she bows to him in the way he has seen Aang bow to the statue of Yangchen in the Southern Air Temple. Katara looks at him in wonder, and mouths, “ _ Good choice, _ ” with a look on her face that means she is truly impressed. He knows. It’s why he chose her. 

She finishes introductions, and turns to Zuko, saying, “Of course it is an honor to have my presence requested by the new Fire Lord, but may I inquire as to why it was requested in the first place?”

Zuko cringed, fully dropping any attempts to appear Fire-Lordly. “Ooooh,  _ please _ don’t do that,  _ enhaou kai.  _ That’s your fake, smarmy Ozai voice, and I kind of hate it. Like, I know I’m technically the Fire Lord now, but… but I’m still just me. I’m still just Zuko.” He knows that it is rude, and definitely  _ not  _ how he should be speaking to her now that he is the Fire Lord, but he doesn’t care. That’s her Ozai voice, not her Zuko voice, and the fact that she used it on him makes his skin crawl in a way he can’t describe. 

He thinks she sees this on his face, because her shoulders fall, and she smiles at him in a way that takes his breath away with its familiarity, and in her Zuko voice she says, “Alright then,  _ mhakenyik _ . It really is wonderful to hear from you, Zuko. You’ve grown into quite a person. But I am a bit confused as to why I’m here. Your letter just said that you needed to speak with me, not what you needed to speak with me for.” She shakes her head with a small laugh. “I never could get you to be totally direct in your writings.”

He breathes, and he smiles so hard his face feels like it might break at the corners, and he manages to croak out, “I really missed you teaching me,  _ enhaou kai. _ ”

Shao-Xi’s face breaks into a smile, sad and happy and heartbroken all at once. She sweeps him up in a hug so tight he feels as if she might never let go. In that moment, he thinks he might be okay with that. “I missed you too, _ mhakenyik, _ ” she whispers in his ear. He bites back tears, and buries his face in her shoulder. She smells like jasmine and lavender, and he wonders how many times she hugged children like this, heartbroken and proud at the same time.

When he pulls himself together and pulls away, he asks her to take a seat so they can talk about why he wanted to speak with her. 

“ _ Enhaou kai, _ ” he starts, “I always thought you were the best teacher I ever had in formal education, but I'm no longer naive enough to think you told the whole story, or even what  _ you _ thought was the whole story. You had to gloss over a lot of horrible things the Fire Nation did when you taught me, and I know you know that too. You were trying to be safe, and I don’t blame you for that, but I’ve realized that we need to _ do  _ better for the world to  _ be  _ better.” He looked at his friends, wearing all different colors, watching him through different eyes. “They helped me see that, in a way that probably no one else could.” He looked back at Shao-Xi, her eyes trained on him attentively.

“We can do better, I know we can. If we can raise the next generations without the propaganda and bias of Sozin, Azulon, and Ozai’s rule, if we can raise them to appreciate the differences in life and culture between the four nations instead of looking down on them, the world will be a better place, full of more understanding and integration.” He took a deep breath. “And that starts with us,  _ enhaou kai.  _ It starts with you.”

He explained his plan. His friends chimed in from time to time, and though Shao-Xi asked a few clarification questions, she mostly just listened, watching Zuko with her sharp amber eyes, taking in the truckloads of information he was dumping on her.

Zuko wanted to fire the current head of the education department, and hire Shao-Xi instead. He wanted her help to reform the Fire Nation’s education curriculum, removing propaganda and the harmful ideas of Fire Nation superiority from its teachings. And, most ambitiously, he wanted her to work with the other nations in an attempt to form a new series of mandatory classes that discussed the rich, unique cultures of the other nations in a positive light, in the hopes that more actual education on the subject would make the nations more willing to work together, and to see each other as they were, instead of how the bias of one government painted them. He even wanted her to consider working with Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe diplomats on the possibility of setting up a foriegn exchange for students.

He finished explaining, took a deep breath, and said, “ _ Enhaou kai _ ? I know it sounds like a lot, but… I can’t think of anyone better for this job. Will you at least think about taking the position?”

Shao-Xi stared at him just long enough for him to start worrying she was upset about something, and then she started laughing, loud and incredulous. She laughed so hard she doubled over, clutching her side. Probably assuming Shao-Xi was laughing  _ at  _ him, Katara inflated, her eyes flashing furiously. But before she could say a word, Shao-Xi said, “Oh,  _ Zuko. _ ” She looked up at him, her eyes glowing. “When did you become such a wonderful, intelligent young person? How, by Agni’s name, did you get so smart when I was gone?” 

Zuko gasped in relief. “You like the idea?” he said, his voice dripping with hope.

Shao-Xi laughed. “No, Zuko. I don’t just like it. I love it.”

His heart soared, and Katara let out a small, “Oh,” and sat down. Sokka snickered and patted her arm.

“What you just described is… everything I have wanted to do for a very long time,” Shao-Xi admitted. “I didn’t think I would ever actually get to, though.”

She leaned forwards, her smile brighter than Agni himself, and said, “You grew into a wonderful person, Zuko. And I am  _ so  _ proud of you.”

Zuko smiled back at her, unable to put the emotion swirling through him into words. “Thank you,  _ enhaou kai.  _ That means more to me than you could possibly know.” He paused. “And, just so you know… you were part of the reason why.”

Shao-Xi laughed, bright and warm, her eyes full of pride. She was proud of him. Of who he had become. He felt like he had swallowed fireflies, and they were filling him with light from within.

“So, will you take the job?” He asked, his heart in his throat. The others leaned forward, waiting for her reply with bated breath. 

Shao-Xi smiled. “I will need to speak with my wife about it, but, yes, Zuko. I think she will be more than willing to make the move back with me, so I can take you up on your offer.”

Turns out, Shao-Xi’s wife of three years was more than willing to come with Shao-Xi. The Earth Kingdom woman had a soft smile, and hands with calluses that suggested she had been a farmer. She greeted Zuko with a kind warmth, bowing to him in Fire Nation tradition, and then pulling him into a soft hug, saying, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Zuko. I’ve heard a lot about you.” The way she looked at Shao-Xi, like she had hung the very stars in the sky, made Zuko think she would have followed her anywhere. The smile Shao-Xi gave back made him think they would follow  _ each other _ anywhere, and each other would be enough. 

Three months later, Shao-Xi and her wife Joni will come back with what few belongings they wished to keep from their home in a small Earth Kingdom town, and Shao-Xi will begin reforming the Fire Nation’s curriculum with a fire that is, frankly, a little stunning. Joni will open one of the best flower shops in the whole capital. They will have tea with him and any of his friends who wish to come once a week, if he can make it, in their small apartment filled with flowers. In fact, the whole group of his friends will eventually begin calling them Aunt Shao and Aunt Joni. Zuko will be pretty sure they adore this. But he will call Shao-Xi  _ enhaou kai  _ until the day she dies.

For now, he smiles at Shao-Xi as his friends cheer, and he basks in the warmth of the first person to tell him that there were always different sides to a story, and those different sides were worth exploring. “Thank you,” he whispers. Shao-Xi smiles, and kisses him on the forehead, and he knows she knows what for.

\----

The party at the tea shop was small. There were no fancy banners, no stuffy noblemen, no diplomats furiously hogging all of their time and attention. It was the best party Zuko had been to in years. 

They had stayed up until the night drifted into the blackness of early morning, and, reluctant as they all were to go their separate ways, had drifted off one by one in various spots of the teashop. A side effect of spending months on the run without ever having a soft bed was, apparently, a startling ability to fall asleep anywhere. And Zuko did mean  _ anywhere.  _

Sokka had propped himself up against a chair with carved feet that had to be digging into his back like no one’s business, and Aang and Katara were curled up on either side of him, their heads resting on his shoulders, backs to the stone wall, all three of them fast asleep. Toph had curled up on a comfy piece of floor, her feet propped up on a teapot they had left on the floor with an abandoned Pai Sho game whose pieces lay scattered around the floor. Suki lay next to her, one arm curled protectively over the younger girl’s shoulders, the other loosely draped over her stomach. Mai, who was apparently the only one not deadened to comfort, had fallen asleep in a cushioned armchair, her head tilted in towards the backrest, her legs slowly slipping off the chair. Zuko and Iroh were the only ones left awake, sipping tea and sitting in content silence.

Zuko looked out over the teashop and its sleeping inhabitants, and something burned in his chest.

He looked out at his friends, no, his  _ family,  _ blueblack and bleeding and covered in scars, bruised and broken and beautiful; still breathing, still existing, still being, in the same strange, wonderful world as him. Hurt, and healing, and alive, alive, alive. He remembers a wish he made surrounded by golden afternoon light, breathing the same air as them on the back of a flying bison, so tangled up in their limbs and their hearts and their love he could not tell where any of them ended and the others began. He thinks he might still be like that, all tangled up in these wonderful people he calls home. He might always be like that. He cannot bring himself to feel anything but joy at the prospect. 

“Uncle,” he says, staring out over his mismatched family. Iroh looks at him, and he looks at Iroh. The words get stuck, lodging in his throat, and he can’t say it all, because he is clumsy with words, but he can say some, and that will be enough. “I did it, Uncle,” he croaks, looking back out over his ridiculous, wonderful family, and then back. “I did it. I made it.”

Uncle’s eyes fill with tears, and he pulls Zuko into a bone crushing hug. Zuko realizes that he is crying, too. It is enough.

He looks over the sleeping forms of the broken family he made, he chose, that chose him, in the middle of a war. In pain, and darkness, and unimaginable suffering, they made this shining, wonderful thing. He looks over the forms of his family, and asleep they look too small for the grief in their bones. They look too small for the joy hiding there, too. They are bruised and broken, blueblack and bleeding from wounds you can’t see with the naked eye, too covered in scars for their years. But that is okay, he thinks, because they have all of a shining forever rippling out in front of them to heal, and live, and love. He loves them with all the fire in his soul, and they love him back just as much. And that will be enough.


	2. Language Key!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Take a wild guess at what this could pOSSIBLY BE. Did you guess it was a language key? I'm SHOCKED. How EVER did you know?

Language Key

Air Nomads

Yuoe- (you-OH-ey) moon

Relame- (reh-la-mey) ( _ me  _ pronounced like in mesa) to mourn

Sai- (sigh)(said quickly, like saying  _ lie _ ) with

Relame sai Yuoe- to mourn with the moon; it is a tradition of the Air Nomads that if you have suffered a great loss, you should try to let yourself begin mourning when the moon rises and cease when the sun rises, as a way of reminding yourself that even though you need to mourn, you should not stop living, that the person/people you are mourning would want you to find peace and happiness, too.

Erave- (eh-RAH-vey) spirit, add - _ v  _ to the end to make plural, spirits ( _ Eravev).  _ The word refers to either a spirit(s) that can be named, or one that cannot. 

Uole- (oo-OH-lay) song, or expression of feelings

Eravev-Uole- prayers for the spirits; the Air Nomads give thanks and gratitude for nature, and the world that they live in, either with traditional chants or with personal ones of their own making. They can be given at any time, in any way that is not disrespectful to the spirits, but are usually given at least once a month. The chants are believed to give the spirits recognition, and that by acknowledging them, the people will be more listened to by the spirits. The other nations used to have similar practices, but they faded away over time. This has left the Air Nomads with a closer relationship to the spirits of nature than other cultures, as they acknowledge both spirits that can be named, and spirits that cannot be named, by using the collective term  _ Eravev,  _ instead of only acknowledging the major spirits with well known names (ex. Tui and La, Agni, ect.)

Quere- to share

Vidale- life

Cuolefar Heobe- (COO-oh-LAY-far A-oh-BAY)creeping lilies, a type of flower that grows by the Southern Air Temple; they cling to rocks, and bloom in the spring, and over the course of the spring, they shift from their beginning pinks to purples. Also called  _ Anefar Jurente  _ by the children of the temple

Anefar Jurente-(Anay-FAR who-REN-tay) sundrop flowers; another name for  _ Cuolefar Heobe _

Quere Vidale- (COO-eh-re vee-DAH-lay)an old tradition in which one observes another culture through someone who actively practices in a place where it is actively practiced 

Veshereh- (veh-sher-eh)soul sibling, a very powerful way of saying, ‘you are my family’. It places emphasis on emotional bonds, and a very deep feeling of love and care. 

Anefar Oanii- (Anay-FAR oh-AH-ni) sun oasis, a string of connected ledges high on the cliff above the Western Air Temple with small pools and gardens that are traditionally tended to by the children of the temple

Water Tribes   
  


Southern

Te Kavéle- (Teh Kah-VEH-leh) literally means,  _ you rot,  _ but it is also a curse word used to speak ill of someone else, meaning that they are lower than rot, or,  _ I hope that you rot _ . To add - _ ne  _ to the end is to say the curse directly to the person you are speaking with ( _ Te Kavélene). _ It is a term of utmost disrespect, and is not ever used in a joking manner.

Fecin- (feh-siin, siin sharp and short) a piece of poop, or something that no one wants to be around, even just for long enough to deal with it.

Shaimek- (SHY-meck) brother, either emotional or biological; to add - _ e  _ to the end is to place emphasis on _ little  _ brother (Shaimeke), and to add - _ a  _ to the end is to put emphasis on  _ big  _ brother (Shaimeka) (can be used as a technical term or a term of endearment)

Shaimel-(SHY-mel) sister, either emotional or biological; to add - _ e  _ to the end is to place emphasis on _ little  _ sister (Shaimele), and to add - _ a  _ to the end is to put emphasis on  _ big  _ sister (Shaimela) (can be used as a technical term or a term of endearment)

Teiekiou- (tey-EE-KEY-oo) empty head, an insult used to say basically, your brain is not there, or your brain  _ is  _ there, but you choose not to use it

Hue Weamen Tewakel- the warm night, the part of the polar winter when the sun does not rise above the horizon, and everyone stays inside and reconnects with their family

Jeunik- (Zhay-oo-nick) a type of seasoning made from seaweed that is dried and then ground into a fine powder, used in many different types of Water Tribe cuisine. There are three different kinds of seaweed used for different types of jeunik, and each is only able to be harvested for about three weeks per year.

Qanikejes- (KA-knee-KEH-zhes) pests; a word to insult people you consider friends or family without risking insult, because used as an insult, it is considered tame, with an understanding of the fact that the person using it cares about you

  
  
  


Northern

  
  


Earth Kingdom

Yetan Gegar- a type of food, consisting of cooked meats and/or vegetables in wraps of thin crust.

Reca we, gengai- (Ray-ka WAY gen-GUY) for you, again; an expression used to say, ‘this was worth it, for you’, or ‘this was no problem’, or, literally, ‘I would do this again for you’ but is associated with feelings of fondness or care

Fire Nation 

Enhaou kai- (en-HOW-OO kai) _teacher_ , or, _person more intelligent than me whom I hold in high respect_ ; it is one of the few gender neutral honorifics in the Fire Nation language

Mhakenyik- (Ma-ken-YEEK) literally means  _ not yet big _ , a term of endearment used to imply smallness, but also great potential

**Author's Note:**

> You made it! Good job! This piece was a result of me after the last piece going, 'Well, that worldbuilding was fun. You know what would be more fun though? Worldbuilding minus (most of) the Aangst, plus character development for Zuko!' And then I was like, 'Ooooh, let's have what he learned reflected in his rule as new Fire Lord.' And 41 pages in Google Docs later, here we are! I had so much fun with this, you guys. I love these disaster children. I was high key projecting my relationship with my sisters in Sokka and Katara's slap fight and the poke fights between the others. (We routinely get into mock-karate fights in the kitchen, despite none of us knowing any karate at all.) This was a blast to make, and I hope you had just as much fun reading it! (Grammar police are welcome. Any and all feedback is appreciated!) :)


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